Ukrainian doctors and nurses have threatened to organize a nationwide strike if the country’s draft budget for 2021 does not include an increase in salaries for medical personnel, the newspaper “Strana.ua” writes.
According to the portal, on December 15, Verkhovna Rada received an appeal from a member of the headquarters to combat COVID-19 Olga Golubovskaya. The medic asked the deputies to influence the situation with low salaries of doctors and increase health care costs.
“This budget will again leave doctors with salaries comparable to unemployment payments. Aren’t you ashamed, people’s representatives?” – said in the appeal of a specialist. She stressed that the country’s authorities have once again taken the path of financing medicine on a leftover basis.
Doctors all over Ukraine began to join Golubovskaya’s demand. They launched a flash mob with the hashtag “vryatuylikarya” (“save the doctor”) on social networks and began recording massively video messages to the parliament and the cabinet of ministers, threatening to strike. “My official salary is 5,385 hryvnia (about 14,200 thousand rubles). We cannot live with such a salary as now,” the publication quotes the words of the doctor of the children’s anti-tuberculosis hospital Vladimir Kudimov.
December 14, the National Health Service of Ukraine (NHSU) reported that At the beginning of 2021, hospitals and clinics of the country may be left without payments due under the program of medical guarantees. The reason is the lack of money to provide it, since the Ministry of Health has not submitted to the government a project on financing the program in 2021.
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine intends to adopt the draft state budget in the second reading on December 15. Parliamentarians have pledged about four percent of the GDP for medicine in 2021. Previously, the country’s Minister of Health Maxim Stepanov said that the health care system in the country is absolutely undeveloped, and citizens receive medical care despite the state. He concluded that there are still “centers of medical care” in the republic, but they are based solely on the initiative of the medical staff.